(MENAFN- AFP) A leading shareholder advisory group Tuesday urged JPMorgan Chase shareholders to end chief executive Jamie Dimon's tenure as chairman and fire a majority of the company's board after a $6.2 billion trading loss.Glass Lewis became the second major advisory group in recent days to endorse splitting the chairman and chief executive roles at JPMorgan in the wake of the bank's London "whale" debacle.ISS Proxy Advisory Services called for that action last week.The pressure came ahead of JPMorgan's annual meeting May 21 as questions about Dimon's fate hang over Wall Street.After leading JPMorgan through the 2008 financial crisis in comparatively good shape, Dimon's star has dimmed after a $6.2 billion trading loss in 2012 by a trader dubbed the London Whale for his outsized bets.Glass Lewis urged a splitting of the chairman and CEO roles, saying that separating the chairman from a role as a corporate officer "is almost always a positive change" because it curbs conflicts of interest, promotes oversight of risk and generally better serves shareholder needs.But Glass Lewis also took a few swipes at JPMorgan over the whale losses."Given the massive trading losses at the Company, we believe shareholders would benefit from independent board leadership to prevent such loss of shareholder value in the future," Glass Lewis said in a statement.Glass Lewis also urged shareholders to fire six of JPMorgan's 11 independent directors, specifically the members of the audit and risk policy committees.Audit committee members James Bell, Crandall Bowles and Laban Jackson "have not satisfactorily performed their duties," Glass Lewis said.These board members should have done more to "ensure that the banks traders cannot obfuscate the values of their positions with as much ease as evidently occurred in the London whale matter," Glass Lewis said.Similarly, Glass Lewis faulted risk committee members David Cote, James Crown and Ellen Futter for not seeking more information on the problem accounts and for not asking "sufficiently probing questions of management at committee meetings."The risk committee was "likely too willing to trust senior management's risk oversight" and did not have adequate reviews in place, Glass Lewis said.JPMorgan's board has offered a strong defense of keeping Dimon in both posts, pointing to the bank's huge financial success under Dimon in comparison with other banks.The company's stance also won support from legendary billionaire investor Warren Buffett in public comments this week.A similar proposal in 2012 to split the chairman and chief executive roles received 40 percent of the shareholder vote last year.The 2012 annual meeting came days after the initial London whale losses were disclosed, but before their massive amount was known and a damning US Senate report on JPMorgan's poor oversight was released.
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